George Washington Carver

George Washington Carver was born into slavery around 1864 near Diamond, Missouri, during the Civil War, and left home young to pursue an education that was denied to him locally. He became the first African American to earn a bachelor of science degree, at Iowa State Agricultural College, and went on to earn a master's degree there, working with mycologist L.H. Pammel at the Iowa State Experimental Station.

In 1896, Booker T. Washington recruited Carver to direct the Agriculture Department at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama. Finding the school short on funds, Carver equipped his own laboratory using salvaged materials, and over nearly five decades of research he developed hundreds of new uses for peanuts, sweet potatoes, soybeans and pecans, promoting crop rotation as an alternative to the soil-depleting cotton monoculture that dominated the post-Civil War South.

Carver's research and outreach — including travelling schools that brought agricultural education directly to impoverished farmers — helped diversify Southern agriculture and improve the economic prospects of Black farmers specifically. He became internationally renowned, consulted by presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and counted Henry Ford and Mahatma Gandhi among his friends, though he never grew wealthy from his hundreds of inventions, largely declining to patent most of them. He died in 1943 and became the first African American honoured with a national monument.